THE BUSINESS OF WRITING
Promo post
Simon Whaley chats to three authors who use promotional email newsletter services to boost their writing business
Simon Whaley
Launched in January 2012, BookBub is a promotional email newsletter service offering bargain books to their millions of subscribers. For many self-published authors, getting a BookBub promotion, or deal as it is sometimes known, can send their book to the top of the charts, boosting sales by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of copies.
Unsurprisingly, services like BookBub are now attracting the traditional publishers, but where one leads, others follow, and there are now several similar services authors can use to boost their writing business, many with more affordable costs. But when should we use these services to get the maximum benefit, and what’s the best way to use them?
Emily Organ (https://emilyorgan. com) is the author of the Penny Green Victorian Mystery series, and the second book in her Augusta Peel 1920s mysteries comes out this March. She uses BookBub mainly to promote her backlist.
‘I usually use newsletter services like BookBub when I want to run a promotion on one of my backlist titles,’ she explains. ‘I find it’s a really good way to keep readers interested in a series. It’s no secret that older titles can lose their visibility on retailers such as Amazon, so regular price promotions can raise the profile of those books and help them find new readers. They’re particularly useful for the first book in the series as that can result in more buy-through for the rest of the series.